A Kenyan court has set a new date to hear submissions in a lawsuit brought against Meta and one of its outsourcing partners by a former Facebook content moderator, who accuses the companies of exploitation and union busting.
If you had been using Instagram’s Android app in the past hour or so, you might have noticed that an error had been causing it to crash seconds after launching, rendering it almost unusable. You weren’t alone: users from multiple regions flooded Twitter with complaints about this phenomenon. According to Downdetector, this bug first appeared around 12:44PM EDT today (September 23rd) — roughly matching the time when this author also started scratching head over the seemingly random crashes. At the time of writing this article, there were still fresh tweets grumbling about this issue.
User reports indicate Instagram is having problems since 12:44 PM EDT. https://t.co/lXKoHvl1HO RT if you’re also having problems #Instagramdown
— Downdetector (@downdetector) September 22, 2022
A Meta representative confirmed to famed software engineer Jane Wong that the company is aware of the outage and it’s working to restore service “as quickly as possible.” While this bug appeared to be exclusive to Instagram’s Android app, Wong told Engadget that the iOS counterpart was also loading very slowly for her, indicating a backend issue.
Instagram partial outage confirmed via Meta comms @alexvoica: https://t.co/USJ51gtVwS
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) September 22, 2022
At present, users who are able to open the app have noted limited functionality, including an inability to access Reels or DMs. We’ll be monitoring the situation as service gradually resumes, and will update if Meta provides additional details on what went wrong.
Update 9/22/22 2:29PM EDT: Meta says Instagram is back to normal as of 2:25PM EDT, though it stopped short at sharing what went wrong. We will share more if we hear back.
And we’re back! We resolved the issue that caused today’s outage, and apologize for any inconvenience. https://t.co/2Av4sC4C5B
— Instagram Comms (@InstagramComms) September 22, 2022
If you’ve been anywhere near social media, local news, or late-night talk shows in the last few days, you’ve probably heard something about “Nyquil Chicken,” a supposedly viral TikTok “challenge” that’s exactly what it sounds like: cooking chicken in a marinade of cold medicine.
News about the supposed trend is usually accompanied by vomit-inducing photos of raw chicken simmering in dark green syrup. It’s both disgusting and, as the FDA recently reminded the public, just as toxic as it looks. But it turns out Nyquil Chicken was neither new, nor particularly viral, and the FDA’s bizarrely-timed warning may have backfired, making the meme more popular than ever.
First, a bit of history: As reporter Ryan Borderick points out in his newsletter Garbage Day, Nyquil Chicken originated as a joke on 4Chan in 2017. The meme briefly resurfaced in January where it got some traction on TikTok before once again fading away.
Then, last week, the FDA — inexplicably — issued a press release warning about the dangers of cooking chicken in Nyquil. In a notice titled “A Recipe for Danger: Social Media Challenges Involving Medicines,” the FDA refers to it as a “recent” trend. But they cite no recent examples, and it’s unclear why they opted to push out a warning more than eight months after the meme had first appeared on TikTok.
Now, in what we can only hope will be a valuable lesson on unintended consequences, we know that it was likely the FDA’s warning about Nyquil chicken that pushed this “challenge” to new levels of virality, at least on TikTok. TikTok has now confirmed that on September 14th, the day before the FDA notice, there were only five searches for “Nyquil chicken” in the app. But by September 21st, that number skyrocketed “by more than 1,400 times,” according to BuzzFeed News, which first reported the TikTok search data.
TikTok, which has recently taken steps to limit the spread of both dangerous “challenges” and “alarmist warnings” about hoaxes, is now blocking searches for “Nyquil Chicken.” Searches now direct users to resources encouraging users to “stop and take a moment to think” before pursuing a potentially dangerous “challenge.”
As both BuzzFeed and Gizmodo note, there’s little evidence that people are actually cooking chicken in Nyquil, much less actually ingesting it. That’s a good thing because, as the FDA makes very clear, doing so is not only extremely gross, but highly toxic. But the whole thing is yet another example of why we should all be more skeptical of panic-inducing viral “challenges.”
“Who’s that behind you?” an anchor for New York’s PIX11 asked journalist Michelle Ross as she finished up an interview.
Andor is a show about the messy side of the galaxy far, far away and the even messier people who inhabit it. Angry people, unpleasant people, liars and killers looking for any way to focus their frustrations at a universe in the grip of totalitarianism. But it’s also about the bell guy.
Meta has finally released the findings of an outside report that examined how its content moderation policies affected Israelis and Palestinians amid an escalation of violence in the Gaza Strip last May. The report, from Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), found that Facebook and Instagram violated Palestinians’ right to free expression.
“Based on the data reviewed, examination of individual cases and related materials, and external stakeholder engagement, Meta’s actions in May 2021 appear to have had an adverse human rights impact on the rights of Palestinian users to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, political participation, and non-discrimination, and therefore on the ability of Palestinians to share information and insights about their experiences as they occurred,” BSR writes in its report.
The report also notes that “an examination of individual cases” showed that some Israeli accounts were also erroneously banned or restricted during this period. But the report’s authors highlight several systemic issues they say disproportionately affected Palestinians.
According to the report, “Arabic content had greater over-enforcement,” and “proactive detection rates of potentially violating Arabic content were significantly higher than proactive detection rates of potentially violating Hebrew content.” The report also notes that Meta had an internal tool for detecting “hostile speech” in Arabic, but not in Hebrew, and that Meta’s systems and moderators had lower accuracy when assessing Palestinian Arabic.
As a result, many users’ accounts were hit with “false strikes,” and wrongly had posts removed by Facebook and Instagram. “These strikes remain in place for those users that did not appeal erroneous content removals,” the report notes.
Meta had commissioned the report following a recommendation from the Oversight Board last fall. In a response to the report, Meta says it will update some of its policies, including several aspects of its Dangerous Individuals and Organizations (DOI) policy. The company says it’s “started a policy development process to review our definitions of praise, support and representation in our DOI Policy,” and that it’s “working on ways to make user experiences of our DOI strikes simpler and more transparent.”
Meta also notes it has “begun experimentation on building a dialect-specific Arabic classifier” for written content, and that it has changed its internal process for managing keywords and “block lists” that affect content removals.
Notably, Meta says it’s “assessing the feasibility” of a recommendation that it notify users when it places “feature limiting and search limiting” on users’ accounts after they receive a strike. Instagram users have long complained that the app shadowbans or reduces the visibility of their account when they post about certain topics. These complaints increased last spring when users reported that they were barred from posting about Palestine, or that the reach of their posts was diminished. At the time, Meta blamed an unspecified “glitch.” BSR’s report notes that the company had also implemented emergency “break glass” measures that temporarily throttled all “repeatedly reshared content.”
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Meta, the company founded on the principle of building connectivity and giving people a voice worldwide, did just the opposite last year and enforced speech policies that violated Palestinian’s freedom of expression and freedom of assembly. That assessment, which claims Meta’s policies negatively impacted…
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
